Tag: hate speech

The Holocaust Began Not With Concentration Camps, But With Hateful Rhetoric. That Part of the Story Cannot Be Forgotten

As people around the world pause this Thursday to observe the solemn occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is worth asking what exactly is being remembered. In recent years, surveys released by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany with the participation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have found some alarming gaps in public knowledge about the Holocaust. In 2018, for example, 45% of adult U.S. respondents couldn’t name a single camp or ghetto.

There is no question that the world needs better and more Holocaust education. As we think about how best to do this in the 21st century, we need to ensure that future generations learn not only what happened during the Holocaust but also how and why.

Nazism did not emerge from nowhere. The Holocaust did not begin with concentration camps, ghettos or deportations. People didn’t wake up one day and decide to participate in mass murder. In fact, the Nazis had been in power in Germany for eight long years before the systematic murder of the Jews began. Continue reading.

Facebook’s Decisions Were ‘Setbacks for Civil Rights,’ Audit Finds

New York Times logoAn independent audit faulted the social network for allowing hate speech and disinformation to thrive — potentially posing a threat to the November elections.

SAN FRANCISCO — Auditors handpicked by Facebook to examine its policies said that the company had not done enough to protect people on the platform from discriminatory posts and ads and that its decisions to leave up President Trump’s inflammatory posts were “significant setbacks for civil rights.”

The 89-page audit put Facebook in an awkward position as the presidential campaign heats up. The report gave fuel to the company’s detractors, who said the site had allowed hate speech and misinformation to flourish. The audit also placed the social network in the spotlight for an issue it had worked hard to avoid since the 2016 election: That it may once again be negatively influencing American voters.

Now Facebook has to decide whether its approach to hateful speech and noxious content — which was to leave it alone in the name of free expression — remains tenable. And that decision puts pressure on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who has repeatedly said that his company was not an arbiter of truth and that it would not police politicians’ posts. Continue reading.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson horrifies viewers with a message disturbingly similar to a white supremacist slogan

AlterNet logoPresumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign accused Fox News host Tucker Carlson of “hate speech” as he came under fire for appearing to echo a white supremacist slogan on Tuesday’s broadcast.

Twitter users widely circulated a screenshot of a chyron which aired on Carlson’s show below images for Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who is of Asian descent, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.

“We have to fight to preserve our nation & heritage,” the chyron read. Continue reading.

Minnesota Saw A Significant Increase In White Supremacist Propaganda In 2019

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – The distribution of white supremacist propaganda in Minnesota saw a significant increase last year, jumping more than 160%, according to a watchdog group.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) says that there were 63 incidents of white supremacist fliers, stickers and posters spotted in Minnesota in 2019. That’s a considerable uptick from 2018, when just 24 incidents of white supremacist propaganda were recorded by the group.

The uptick in Minnesota is consistent with an increase in propaganda across the Midwest and the country, the ADL reports. Year over year, the region saw a 118% increase in white supremacist propaganda while the country saw a 123% increase. Continue reading.

Former Fox News correspondent warns the network ‘foments fear and anger’ as analysis shows El Paso terrorist echoed the toxic rhetoric of right-wing media stars

AlterNet logoThere was a time when right-wing media, apart from Patrick Buchanan, were much more forgiving of undocumented immigrants and praised President Ronald Reagan for granting so many of them amnesty during the 1980s. But in recent years, right-wing media have found that fear-mongering over illegal immigration can be great for ratings or online traffic — and a report for the New York Times finds that the El Paso shooter used much of the same inflammatory language and rhetoric that right-wing media stars have been espousing.

According to Carl Cameron, former chief political correspondent for Fox News, the language of the extreme fringe is now common in right-wing media. Cameron told the Times that right-wing media are now “putting that into the zeitgeist…. Fox goes out and looks for stuff that is inherently on fire and foments fear and anger.”

Shortly before the terrorist mass shooting in El Paso that left 22 people dead, the killer (according to law enforcement) posted a 2300-word manifesto on 4Chan asserting that he was acting in order to fight an “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” And the Times report (written by Jeremy W. Peters, Michael M. Grynbaum, Keith Collins, Rich Harris and Rumsey Taylor and published on August 11) notes that right-wing media stars like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson have been using the same type of rhetoric.

View the complete August 12 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

How the El Paso Killer Echoed the Incendiary Words of Conservative Media Stars

New York Times logoTucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”

When another group approached the border six months later, Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: “You can shoot invaders.”

A few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity. “The objective is to dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture,” Mr. Limbaugh said, adding: “This is why people call this an invasion.”

‘How the hell is this not inciting violence?’ Gun store erects billboard with minority lawmakers’ faces

Washington Post logoThe sign warns of the “4 Horsemen” — typically a reference to biblical imagery symbolizing the end of the earth: conquest, war, famine and death.

But the North Carolina billboard that went up over the weekend does not depict horsemen. It shows photos of the freshman congresswomen also known as “the Squad”: Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of

New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The billboard calls the progressive Democratic members of Congress “idiots” and is signed by “the Deplorables.”

Cherokee Guns, a Murphy, N.C., gun shop about a mile away from the sign, took responsibility for the billboard. An image shared to the shop’s Facebook page Sunday went viral this week and drew a sharp rebuke from the women pictured, as well as anti-gun-violence advocates. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence on Monday called the billboard “violent rhetoric.”

View the complete July 31 article by Michael Brice-Saddler and Reis Thebault on The Washington Post website here.

What history reveals about surges in anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments

The shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh is believed to be the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. Eleven people were killed when the gunman burst in on the congregation’s morning worship service carrying an assault rifle and three handguns.

The suspect, Robert Bowers, is reported to be a frequent user of Gab, a social networking site that has becoming increasingly popular among white nationalists and other alt-right groups. He is alleged to have regularly reposted anti-Semitic slurs, expressed virulent anti-immigrant sentiments, called immigrants “invaders,” and claimed that Jews are “the enemy of white people.”

The magnitude of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre may be unprecedented, but it is only the latest in the series of hate crimes against Jews. In February 2017, more than 100 gravestones were vandalized at a cemetery outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and at another Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia. Indeed, hate crimes have been on an increase against minority religions, people of color and immigrants. In the 10 days following the 2016 presidential election, nearly 900 hate-motivated incidents were reported, many on college campuses. Many of these incidents targeted Muslims, people of color and immigrants, along with Jews.

View the complete October 28 article by Ingrid Anderson, Associate Director of Jewish Studies, Lecturer, Arts & Sciences Writing Program, Boston University, on TheConversation.com website here.

At Trump’s bully pulpit, it’s ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ with race often used as a device to polarize

The following article by Cathleen Decker was posted on the Los Angeles Times website September 23, 2017:

Supporters of President Trump applaud Friday at a campaign rally in Huntsville, Ala. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

For much of his time as president, Donald Trump has been the bully at the bully pulpit, castigating targets foreign and domestic. Much of Trump’s bluster attempts to divide people into us-against-them, and it often has a single polarizing agent: race.

On Friday night, as he has many times before, Trump inflamed an almost exclusively white Southern audience against opponents who he said were trying to steal their heritage and attack their values. In that Alabama speech and on Saturday, he criticized African American athletes who had exercised free speech by declining to stand during the national anthem. Continue reading “At Trump’s bully pulpit, it’s ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ with race often used as a device to polarize”